Picseli.co.uk

Monday, 24 November 2008

Do we need SEO?

Since starting my SEO project I have spent a lot of time searching the web to find out about search engine optimisation, what other people are doing and techniques that work. There is a lot of discussion on the web at the moment about why you don't need SEO. A lot stemming from this post - 7 Reasons Why You Don't Need SEO .

While I disagree with the statement, I agree with everything that is said in the post and I was quite relieved when I realised that the majority of issues highlighted are generally not an issue with websites we design. We build websites with clean and semantic coding that comply to web standards, and are generally search engine friendly.

However, there's only so much we can do and while we can help and advise you throughout, things like writing content is down to you. Especially on a content managed website.

Content & Link BuildingTo get peole to link to your website for authentic 'link building', you need to start giving people good content. This is why people and companies blog, why How To guides are popping up everywhere and why company sites are containing more news and useful information rather than just promoting their products. Link building can also get a bit out of hand. It only works if the links to and from your site are relevant, they need to make sense and be useful to your users.How do you feel when you read content that doesn't really make sense because it's just been crammed full of keywords? If your content is well written, and gives people the information they need the keywords will be there, userswill visit AND STAY on your site and other websites will link to you. It's all very logical really.

And the answer is...I think we need SEO, but you shouldn't necessarily be paying through the nose for it. If you have had a website for a few years the chances are you may have just missed out on the SEO wave and your site may not be best optimised. Although if your site is more than a few years old it may well be time for a change anyway....